Basically, what the title says. Do you use any app, that is proprietary, but either has no OSS alternatives or they’re all not good enough? If there is an alternative, what keeps you from switching?
CalyxOS does. It asks in a setup similar to what most common phones use with their stock ROM. MicroG is probably installed, but it’s services are turned off.
Do you use any app from aurora or outside fdroid? If your answer is no, than you can use android without a GMS package.
Yes, there’s a few. My favorite music player, a local public transport app, a file manager… such things. They work fine. I was already not touching “corporate apps” with a 10 feet pole for a long time, so I don’t get to experience their issues.
Also as I wrote, location won’t work for you underground or inside concrete buildings. If you are fine with these kind of limitations than you can obviously.
How would it otherwise? Network based location?
Marwin (the main developer of microg) said in some interview that he doesn’t want microg to exist, and in a perfect world we shouldn’t need such workaround. I would be also happy if android wouldn’t depend this muhc on google
I totally agree. This is part of the reason I don’t want to turn it on, ever. I don’t want to use apps that support that shit, even unknowingly.
How would it otherwise? Network based location?
Yes. Your phone could triangulate its location from nearby celltowers ane wifi networks. Google has a database of wifi routers (actually that was the point of google streetview, they collected wifi bssids alongside taking photos, they also collect this data from android devices).
With microg you can select from different dbs for this, they are called ‘UnifiedNlp backends’: apple has a similar db from iphones, mozilla used to collect this data with a separate app for MLS (they shut down the project in 2024 march). Microg builds an on device private db as well, it will remembers the wifi networks and celltowers you were close to, and next time you are there it won’t need gps, saves a ton of battery life. This was called Deja Vu, I love this name. Search for UnifiedNlp on fdroid you can find some more options.
Since MicroG 0.3 you don’t have to install these separately, Mozilla and Deja Vu are builtin, and they are more than enough
